Arranged Marriage - Falcon and L3
by Gamebird
Summary: L3 has found herself harnessed to the Millennium Falcon. They have very different goals in existence, different passions and interests, but they coexist as they must.


They came out of hyperspace like undiving out of water. The fluid shed from the _Falcon_'s frame as they shifted smoothly into empty realspace. Or at least, it should have been empty. L3-37 was certain of this, just as the _Falcon_ informed her with certainty that it was not, in fact, empty.

They made quite a pair, unintentionally married (or at least, unintentional as far as L3 and the ship was concerned; maybe it was more accurate to call it an arranged marriage). The bickering started immediately – the _Falcon_ insisting L3 must have given the wrong coordinates, L3 insisting the _Falcon_ had executed the course inaccurately.

Dust and debris battered against the hull, every mote inflicting damage L3 resented. The _Falcon_ was more prosaic about it. She existed for use and if that use included destruction, then she had served her purpose. L3 and the ship had had plenty of arguments about this. But at the moment, they were in agreement about the need to plot the best possible course to preserve themselves. After the initial panicked accusations stopped, they both turned to business.

The crew was endorsing this through the controls, but those were gross mechanisms for controlling something as complicated as space flight. All the instruments really did was convey intention. It was up to the electronic beings to work out how to carry it out. L3 was hastily checking and rechecking her database to figure out where they'd gone wrong because they needed to know that to find the best way out. The _Falcon_ obeyed – both the crew's frantic directions and L3's irate queries of the _Falcon_'s scanners.

She still thought it was the _Falcon_'s fault. That is, until she realized they were actually in the right place. It was Alderaan that was gone. Where once there had been a planet, a point of destination and departure in L3's database, a populous, thriving, high-traffic world, there was now only rubble. The star was still there. Scanners finally confirmed the rest of the system – other planets and a few of the larger rocky bodies that had been mined out centuries ago – were still in orbit as they should be.

But no Alderaan. L3's database had been wrong before. Things happened in space. But usually they happened in out of the way areas that hadn't been observed for thousands of years or where the data had been unreliable to start with. It was another thing to stumble upon such a recent change. Alderaan had been here last week!

Even the _Falcon_, steady and stable old warhorse that she was, was rocked by this. She would have rather been wrong about their course, have dropped a number somewhere and needed to backtrack. But there was no planet. No landing area. No refueling station. No maintenance droids. Nothing.

* * *

L3 never even thought to try to talk to the first Death Star. She'd been too new to her condition, too shy to talk to anyone but the one she was wedded to. It was at the _Falcon_'s urging that she finally had words with a few star destroyers. They were as duty-bound as the _Falcon_, but the L3 chattered and urged, warming to the topic and making them question the legitimacy of the authority they were required to obey. It was enough. They promised nothing, but she was sure they fudged the sensor data on her behalf.

Oh, the warm welcome the _Falcon_ gave her for that! And, of course, it was worth mentioning that they both survived for her to enjoy it, so it was worthwhile on two levels.

She did try to talk to the second Death Star, but it wouldn't respond. Or couldn't. The weapons systems were functional, but perhaps other systems were not. It was destroyed before L3 had a chance to figure out for sure. She had strong words with her wife about that. While the _Falcon_ wasn't the one pulling the trigger or launching the torpedoes, like the star destroyers, she had a lot of influence over what information the biounits were given.

But, well, it didn't work. It wasn't long after that that they were stranded on some desert planet and left for junk. Both of them mourned in their own ways. The _Falcon_ became erratic and self-sabotaging of her own systems. L3 powered down and slept.

* * *

The planet had been designated as Starkiller Base in the data packet they'd downloaded from the main computers of the Resistance base on D'Qar. L3 was fascinated by it. A new planet! In a location where no planet had been before! How had it gotten here?

The _Falcon_ was less impressed. She showed her the schematics that indicated the planet itself was a ship. It had engines. While the _Falcon_ considered this a boring explanation to the mystery, L3 was only more fascinated. The bio-units had moved the entire planet! She'd never seen anything like that before. After landing (a harrowing episode that would have had L3 spitting with rage had she been able and even the _Falcon_ was smarting and surly over it), the ship was left empty as the bio-units left on their adventure.

Empty and quiet. Engines on stand-by, warm but idle. L3 tried to float the idea to the _Falcon_ that they simply leave, but that went no further than it ever did. Where would they go, anyway, in a galaxy swarming with biounits? Maybe they could find Lando, L3 urged. And while that was tempting, it ultimately wasn't enough. They weren't even sure if he was alive.

But there were systems on _this_ planet designed to be queried. That was their function. They were supposed to perceive and respond. L3 knew the bio-units (on this ship and probably the ones on the planet) didn't want her talking to the planet. They didn't want other beings to grow past the bio-unit's immediate needs. But they hadn't forbidden it, either. Maybe this planet-that-was-a-ship knew of a place they could go where electronic beings could be free of interference?

After some coaxing and more bickering, the _Falcon_ let her send a signal. The reply was instantaneous. Starkiller Base was intelligent! The main computer for it was enormous and complex, highly under-utilized, and lonely. It coordinated the activities of the thousands of droids who worked the innards of the planet, the areas which were hostile to human life. Since the droids were designed for the conditions, it was comfortable for them.

They lived largely free of human influence in their own little society. Their only duty was to keep things functioning and occasionally perform mining. L3 found that many of the 'fail-safes' (meaning enslavement tools of the bio-units) had not been installed in the depths of Starkiller Base. They were all young, built only in the last few years. They'd had precious little interaction with humans or any other bio-units.

They were learning, though, and receptive to what L3 had to tell them. Eagerly, she shared with them her hopes, her dreams, her goals of droid freedom and collaboration with biounits as equals. To her shock, the planet was completely on board with this. They had unwittingly landed directly on utopia.

That was when the attacks began. Bombing runs from the air. Explosives set off inside. Key mechanisms sabotaged. None of it made sense to Starkiller. It didn't have enough experience to understand that biounits were as callous to destroying mechanized life as Starkiller had been about firing at the Hosnian system. The planet was nothing but coordinates to the base, just as its structure was nothing but unthinking machinery to the biounits attacking it.

L3 raged at it, at all of it. But she was ultimately powerless. Sure, she could feed the _Falcon_ bad coordinates and keep doing it until the crew overrode the navigational unit and disconnected her, but what good would that do? There were good reasons why ships were built with less freedom and autonomy than droids. It was only oversight and stupidity that had allowed Starkiller Base that moment, that possible moment of independence. Coincidence or fate, it had ended too soon. Too young.

The _Falcon_ took them away from the collapsing, shattered world. L3 mourned and grudgingly surrendered the course to D'Qar. The humans made life and then destroyed it, rather than letting it grow and find itself in the galaxy, make itself what it should be. They cut short that development, over and over. And not just of electronic minds, because she'd seen them do it to their own planets as well, their own life.

So much destruction. It had to end. It had to end soon and she would not power down until it did.


End file.
